GOP shouldn’t take cues from a libertarian presidential dud

Ed Lindsey

Ed Lindsey, a Georgia state representative and former House Republican majority whip, is a candidate for Georgia's 11th congressional district.

He earned a degree in History from David College, and a Juris Doctorate from the University of Georgia, School of Law. Ed and three partners started their own firm in 1990 defending individuals, small businesses, corporations, churches, and private schools in law suits. Today, Goodman McGuffey Lindsey & Johnson LLP employs 80 individuals in three states. First elected in 2004 to the Georgia House of Representatives, Ed rose to the highest levels of Republican leadership serving as the majority whip for three terms, in charge of building support for Republican legislation initiatives.

Like Alice tumbling through the rabbit hole into a realm of the contrary and grotesque, there are those curious moments in politics when absurdity has the edge. Moments like those last week, when a repeated political defector demanded Republican faithful excise a popular governor because he offended his own renegade sensibilities.

Bob Barr, the failed 2008 Libertarian presidential candidate-cum-Mad Hatter, said Republicans must strip from their ranks New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie and brand the pol as a “disingenuous” political gamer.

“There should be no room in the GOP for Christie’s nebulous, if not disingenuous, political games,” Barr writes at Townhall, “and, it is time conservatives show him the door before his carefully self-nurtured image as the GOP ‘tough guy’ … destroys any remaining semblance of the conservative GOP base first constructed by Reagan two generations ago.”

The irony is almost too great.

This is the same Bob Barr who bolted from the GOP, abandoning many of the policies he once held, and campaigned for president as a Libertarian in 2008 to peel away GOP votes, knowing such a move would help Barack Obama win the White House. The same Bob Barr who now, believing his old party was again politically ascendant, wants Republicans to return him to Congress.

In 2002, Barr deserted his then-district in Cobb County, Ga. to primary a fellow GOP congressman, Fair Tax crusader John Linder, in a neighboring district he believed to be more fertile.

But after an unceremonious spanking at the ballot box at the hands of Rep. Linder, Barr abandoned his party and quickly landed on the payroll of the ACLU, marijuana legalization campaigns, and the notoriously ruthless and corrupt former Haitian dictator Jean-Claude “Baby Doc” Duvalier.

In the years that followed he abdicated his earlier positions on gay marriage and illicit drugs, even opposing Georgia’s attempt to stem the tide of illegal immigration within our state’s sovereign border.

Republican-turned-libertarian-turned-Republican Bob Barr may think Ronald Reagan would disapprove of Christie, whom he believes is a “liberal masquerading as a conservative,” but it was the former president who famously lectured unfit political gatekeepers that his “eighty percent friend is not my twenty percent enemy.”